arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

HarnessDev: Can LLMs Create and Evolve Their Own Agent Harness?

arXiv:2609.01437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As agents move from research prototypes to deployed tools, their capability increasingly depends on model-external execution infrastructure, commonly...

By Yuhao Wu, Jingyuan Zhang, Jiajun Shi, Xinping Lei, Qingshui Gu, Yuxuan Zhang, Zexuan Wang, Chen He, Chen Huang, Maojia Song, Zhiyuan Zeng, Shaowen Wang, Jinkai Liu, Yunfeng Shi, Jiaheng Liu, Shen Yan, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang, Wenxuan Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Co-Evolving Harnesses and Models: On-Policy Correction Helps Weaker Models Catch Up Where Imitation Fails

arXiv:2609.09134v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent harnesses (the system prompt, tool set, execution hooks, and context-management scaffolding around a model) are a critical determinant of agentic...

By Zhou Yu, Bin Bi, Shiva Kumar Pentyala, Shubham Mehrotra, Sougata Chaudhuri, Shilpa Bhagavath, Zeyuan Chen, Ran Xu, Phil Mui, James Zhu, Sitaram Asur
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

EVOHARNESSBENCH: Can Your Agents Keep Pace with an Evolving Harness?

EVOHARNESSBENCH is a new benchmark that tests how LLM-based agents handle changes in their tool, skill, and agent harnesses over time. It includes 17 deterministic harness streams with 802 tasks, 520 tools, 42 skills, and 62 agents, and evaluates agents in two settings: deployment evaluation and self‑evolving adaptation evaluation. The study finds that harness expansion can cause forgetting, adaptation gains are inconsistent, and preserving old competence does not always aid new capability adaptation, highlighting harness evolution as a distinct challenge for agent development.

By Zixuan Ke, Vaidehi Patil, Haizhou Shi, Yang Li, Ye Liu, Sarath Shekkizhar, Anurag Koul, Jiayu Wang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Semih Yavuz, Mohit Bansal, Shafiq Joty
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

EvoHarnessBench: Can Your Agents Keep Pace with an Evolving Harness?

arXiv:2609.04280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern LLM-based agents operate through a harness of tools, reusable skills, and specialist agents that shapes what they observe and what the...

By Zixuan Ke, Vaidehi Patil, Haizhou Shi, Yang Li, Ye Liu, Sarath Shekkizhar, Anurag Koul, Jiayu Wang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Semih Yavuz, Mohit Bansal, Shafiq Joty
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

CHART: A Harness-Rotation Curriculum for Harness-Robust Search Agents

The paper introduces CHART, a curriculum that rotates harnesses during training to teach search agents parallel search strategies robustly across different harness configurations. Unlike static harness augmentation, CHART gradually consolidates behavior by graduating learned harnesses and replacing them, maintaining a reward gap that drives learning. Experiments show CHART enables agents to parallelize on 89% of held‑out harnesses, improves performance on a new QA task by 5.6pp, and benefits more from meta‑harness search than baselines.

By Xinlu Zhang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zhihan Zhang, Besnik Fetahu, Xi Chen